Artificial intelligence is our society’s newest utopian vision. Even as the tech giants are embedding it into every piece of software we use, with sparkling icons offering suggestions based on its artificial smarts, they are also treating us to visions for how it can Change Everything. Not only will AI alter how we write emails, draft essays, create art, and do science, but the promise of artificial intelligence, if the optimists are to be believed, is the opportunity to inhabit a wildly new version of our current world—not just our familiar universe, but one better, faster, and more vibrant: one that eliminates hunger, death, poverty, and all the imperfections of life. When superintelligence comes to be, we are promised lives of leisure with abundance all around us, with Universal Basic Income sprinkled like pixie dust. Disease will be eradicated, and so too will aging. We will be granted access to deep and broad knowledge; ignorance will be banished. In the words of Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, we will soon have access to “a country of geniuses in a datacenter,” all focused on solving problems and making scientific discoveries. We will live in a “post-scarcity utopia,” ushered in by advances in AI.
A utopia is, by definition, a state of being that does not exist. Thomas More created the word in 1516 by combining the Greek words for “not” and “place,” so that even as he described this place, he was hinting at the impossibility of its existence. The concept of a perfect society goes back much further; Plato, in The Republic, describes the ideal place, inhabited by idealized humans. Utopias have historically been most useful as a kind of foil for our own reality, helping us see the uphill climb involved in trying to create this non-existent state of being.
And utopian visions are not new to the tech world either. There are the mantras and mottos of Big Tech companies, such as Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” There have long been dreams full of superintelligence, brain uploading, immortality, and transhumanism. And so too with community and connection. Technology companies have long promised a utopian vision of a deeply networked society—Meta’s goal is to “build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible”—but promises of perfection are always overstated. The tech gods promised connection, but we instead received context collapse. They promised a global square, and instead, we got waves of misinformation, uniquely tailored to our individual interests. Pope Leo also took issue with this perspective in his recent encyclical, cautioning against a technological version of salvation.
So if the promises of AI sound overhyped and implausible, that’s because they probably are. And that’s a good thing. Humans were not designed to live in constant anticipation of utopia or just-over-the-horizon perfection. If we believe that our future world will be a lot like the one we currently inhabit, but with new opportunities for significant improvements, we can embrace our present world as one that offers opportunities for experimentation and openings for human creativity enhanced by these developing technologies. That vision is a lot easier to absorb, and also gives us something concrete to work toward.
Utopian visions are not new to the tech world.
Jewish sources offer precisely this kind of iterative approach, one that balances change and innovation with maintenance. When it comes to achieving lofty goals, Ethics of the Sages, the third-century collection of Jewish wisdom, has this to say: “It is not up to you to finish the work; neither are you free to desist from it.” We don’t set up massive milestones that feel unattainable; instead, we roll up our sleeves and dig into the day-by-day work of trying to balance all that we want to achieve. To paraphrase one of the medieval rabbinic interpreters, finishing the work—with the result that striving and struggling will be obsolete—is not in humanity’s contract. Our job is to apply human creativity in service of continual incremental progress.
This is the embodiment of a point made by the philosopher Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (first published in 1945), which distinguishes between piecemeal engineering and utopian engineering when trying to improve society. The former relies on removing barriers and rectifying problems, while the latter quixotically and unsuccessfully tries to reimagine society entirely. As Popper notes, “The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.”
Don’t get us wrong—utopian futures certainly have a place. Both of us grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation and are still enamored of its vision of the United Federation of Planets. But when we focus on the utopia and not on the small iterative steps to get there, we can be easily led astray. In fact, this iterative approach—a “thousand small sanities,” per the title of Adam Gopnik’s 2019 book of the same name—is often the best way to make meaningful change. And it is a deeply Jewish approach to the future.
The name for the future reality that traditional Jewish texts dream of is “the World to Come.” We are fuzzy on many of the details of this future universe, and we are never asked to try to create it in this world. Instead, Jews have Shabbat, which is described as “a taste of the World to Come.” We don’t fully experience this vision of the future, and we aren’t asked to create it, but for one day a week, we experience just a brush with this future World. That taste—which is, according to the Talmud, precisely one-sixtieth of the World to Come—is meant to infuse the rest of the week with a sense that we are building toward a joyous future. It is an awareness that we keep in the background as we move through the other six days of the week. The work that we do—the problems we solve, the structures we create, the care we show for others—all of this is in service of building towards a better world, one task at a time.
Jewish sources demand that, instead of imagining ourselves on the precipice of a utopia created by powerful outside forces, we look at each action we take as a chance to make a small but critical change. Instead of “building to bring the world closer together,” per Facebook’s motto, the great sage Hillel had the following advice: “Do not separate yourself from the community.” Forget about connecting the entire world, Hillel urged, and don’t be distracted by the Platonic ideal of what a social life might look like. Instead, consider the natural human tendency to put up barriers to inclusion or involvement, and make choices that resist that tendency. We cannot be certain that the online spaces we inhabit will bring us together in meaningful ways, but we can work to prevent the worst of the digital habits that push us apart.
The work that we do—the problems we solve, the structures we create, the care we show for others—all of this is in service of building towards a better world, one task at a time.
In an extreme version of the AI and broader technological utopia, the acquisition of knowledge might be as simple as a download; click or press a button, or blink our eyes with our brain-computer interfaces, and there’s nothing we won’t know. Though pouring all of humanity’s knowledge—perhaps with ever-present AI assistance?—into our minds, then going wild, might make us smarter than we can imagine (along some sort of definition of intelligence), it’s not a way to live as a human being. “Turn it and turn it again,” the ancient rabbis say, describing their vision for studying Torah—the ultimate source of wisdom per the rabbinic tradition. These texts are traditionally understood to be endlessly fascinating—emphasis on the “endless.” Read it once, and you’ll learn something you didn’t know before. Then, read it again, wait a few years, rinse and repeat. Learning is iterative and requires hands-on engagement; new meanings emerge from repeated encounters, and there’s no possibility of knowing everything with the flip of a switch.
Consider the original version of the oft-repeated Jewish phrase “tikkun olam.” Before it was reinvented by the Jewish social justice movement, “fixing the world” referred to early rabbinic enactments that adjusted previously established laws in order to make them work in real-world conditions. In other words, the rabbis found that there were edge cases that were not anticipated by the original (law) code and produced undesirable results, so they tweaked that code to improve it. Legislation has to interact with the messy realities of everyday life, and a system that anticipates a utopia, or tries to construct one all at once, will just cause frustration. Adjusting, improving, and slowly iterating on a system to see what works and what might work even better is Judaism’s tried-and-true approach to building successful societies.
Even in messianic times, the Talmud asserts, the world will still operate more or less as it does now. “There will always be needy among you,” says the Talmud, quoting Deuteronomy. In other words, people will still be people, and human nature will continue unabated. We’ll generate problems, and we’ll use human creativity to try to solve those problems. AI isn’t exciting because it promises a perfect world. It is exciting because it opens up so many new avenues for humans to try, again and again, to perfect aspects of our worlds that we wish were different.
Turn it and turn it again. Learning is iterative and requires hands-on engagement; new meanings emerge from repeated encounters.
If the Jewish approach to AI does not revolve around the imposition of a single utopian vision, then the focus should be on how AI technologies can act as enabling tools: ones that allow each of us to build the kind of world we might want, enabled by personalized and bespoke software, and interact with information in ways that fit each of us, rather than having to settle for a one-size-fits-all solution. The novelist Robin Sloan has written of the beauty of an “app [that] can be a home-cooked meal.” And now AI provides the ability to prompt new software into existence, whether you are an expert programmer or not. A home-cooked meal, by definition, may never be as perfectly crafted and as beautifully presented as the one you buy in a restaurant, but it holds all the authenticity of human investment. There is an open-ended potential with this tech, allowing each of us to make apps for our own family and communities, using AI to chip away at obstacles and create the world as we might each want it to be.
Someday, AI may put an end to jobs, but it won’t put an end to work, because creative labor is part of what it means to be a human being. AI may cure people, but a functioning society will still depend on people caring for other people. In the long run, perhaps AI will solve all of our problems—but that fact is less pressing than the fact that, already, AI is empowering people to solve more and more of our problems, one step at a time.
Steve Jobs spoke of the computer as a “bicycle for the mind”: just as the bicycle allows humans to move about more efficiently, the computer can do the same thing for how we think. Whether this involves learning, creation, or connection, computers are a modern mechanism for enabling and empowering these abilities, instilling the values we hold into the world in which we live.
Therein lies the potential of artificial intelligence from a Jewish perspective—not as a far-off goal or panacea, but as a set of tools that provide each of us the means to chip away at barriers and obstacles and create an improved society. The famous Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva is said to have been inspired to reach for greatness after observing the power of water to wear away stone, drop by drop, as he drew water from the local well. Letter by letter, text by text, Rabbi Akiva shaped his destiny. The utopian vision may be there, but the work takes small steps to achieve.